“Hit the lights on your way out.”
SILAS CLOSED his eyes for an eight count. When he opened them, the pain was still there. He pinched the bridge of his nose. The nap he’d taken earlier in the day had helped clear his head, but it had done little to protect against eyestrain. By the feel of it, he’d been staring at the computer screen for about an hour too long. He glanced at the clock on the wall, and it told him his late night had turned into an early morning. Again.
He leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. Both knees popped. He touched the save icon with his finger, flipped the computer off, and folded it back into his desktop. That was enough for one night. He wasn’t going to work himself into a migraine twice in one week.
He locked his office door behind him and headed for the stairs. On the main level he saw light spilling down the hall from the west wing. He paused, searching his pocket for his car keys. He pulled them out, looked at them, then put them back in his pocket and turned toward the light.
Vidonia was bent over a series of plasticine prints. The underlighting recast her face in a net of unfamiliar angles. She held a magnifying glass in her hands and occasionally looked through it for a closer inspection of her work. The prints completely absorbed her. He watched her for a full minute before speaking.
“It’s not so strange,” he said.
“What’s that?” she answered quickly, without looking up. Silas realized she’d known he was standing there for some time.
“What we’ve been doing here at Helix for the past twelve years.”
“I guess that would depend on your perspective.”
Silas stepped into the room. “It’s what man has been doing for tens of thousands of years.”
“Genetic engineering? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
“No, it’s true. They just didn’t call it that.”
“What did they call it?”
Silas looked down at the sheets. They were incomprehensible to him. “Oh, many different things. They called it the fattest cow. They called it a best laying chicken. The fluffiest sheep.”
“DNA splicing is a far cry from animal husbandry.”
“Not really. Not if you think about it. You try and accumulate the genes you want into a given set of animals. You can do it the slow and inefficient way, by breeding. Or you can do it the fast way, in a petri dish. But it’s all the same thing, the gathering together of desired genes. The elimination of the undesired. Only the technology is different.”
“I don’t think you’d ever get this,” she said, gesturing toward the shadowy plastic sheets, “through selective breeding.”
“No, you never would. I said what we’ve done at Helix for the last twelve years isn’t so strange. What Evan Chandler has done is an altogether different story. This wasn’t the gathering of genes. This was the invention of new ones. The difference is highly significant.”
She finally looked up from the table, and he saw the strain on her face. He recognized the frustration. She was an intelligent woman, and intelligent people were used to being able to understand what they were studying. “Your inventor was either a genius or a madman,” she said. “And I can’t tell which.”
“Well, I think you know which gets my vote.”
She smiled. He knew better than to tell her to get some sleep. He knew how he reacted when people suggested that to him.
“Well, I’m heading home,” he said instead. “Tomorrow, Tay is having a training exercise. You’re welcome to come by if you’d like.”
“Are you going to get another innards bath?”
“Not this time. He said robotics will be involved.”
“I’ll try, but I doubt it. The computer sims are going to finish up the blood workup around noon. I’ve been working on oxygen loads for more than a week now.”
“Okay, how does it look?”
“Complicated, like everything else, I guess. I’ll know more tomorrow.”
“Let me know.”
She turned back to her sheets. “You’ll be the first I tell.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
It’s the newest thing in behavior-modification technology,” Tay was telling them. Silas and Ben stared at the contraption with uncertainty. The three men stood in knee-deep straw amid the clutter of the gladiator compound. Before them stood a man-size robotic contrivance layered in heavy Teflon padding. Several thick arms extended from the broad spherical core. To Silas’s discriminating eye, it looked like a multi-limbed snowman on steroids. “This does what, exactly?” he asked.
“It is supposed to represent a competitor. I control it by remote from the observation loft.” Tay pointed. A metal staircase climbed the far wall twenty feet to the glassed-in balcony. The observation loft was supposed to give a comprehensive view of everything that happened in the cage. It provided this vantage by being—at least partially, anyway—in the cage itself.
“This thing fights?” Silas asked.
“With a little remote-control help. It’s not a quick lateral mover—more of a stand-and-deliver type of device—but each of those limbs is loaded with a thirty-pound payload of sand, so it packs a wallop. And the arms are fast, very fast.”
Silas glanced up the far wall. “I think I’d want more than a pane of glass between myself and what’s going to be happening out here.”
“That’s bulletproof,” Tay said, gesturing toward the observation loft. “No worries.”
Silas moved closer and pushed a finger into the Teflon padding that lined the rounded base of the robot. It dimpled softly beneath the pressure of his finger. “This thing won’t hurt the gladiator, will it? Injury is the last thing we need three months before showtime.”
“No. I’ll be careful. I just want to rile it up a bit, see if I can’t get its aggression up.”
“You remember the goat, don’t you?” Ben asked.
“Yeah. ’Twas a beautiful sight. Just what a trainer loves to see. All that blood and gore.”
“Thrown all over Silas,” Ben added.
“Icing on the cake,” Tay said.
Silas smiled despite himself. “Okay, let’s see what this thing can do.” He turned toward the gate.
“Aren’t you going to join me?” Tay gestured back toward the observation loft again.
“Nah, I want to be down close to the action. I’ll take my view from here,” Silas said. Ben followed him out of the enclosure, and Silas checked the locking mechanism on the gate twice.
The two men watched through the bars as Tay ascended the stairs. He stepped through the door into the loft and waved to them through the glass. Then he moved toward the front, and his arms played across a console hidden from view beneath the row of windows.
A moment later, the robot buzzed as it powered up, and then the arms slowly lifted in long arcs, flexing and extending. The robot twisted and jabbed for half a minute before the hatch portal clanged in the back wall.
The hatch opened.
The gladiator entered the enclosure slowly, as if sensing that something was wrong. It had grown since the goat incident, now approaching seven feet in height. Wide nostrils sniffed the air, and its eyes locked on the robot. It stared for several seconds without moving before beginning a slow creep forward. Staying low to the straw, it moved on four bent limbs, wings folded tight and flat against its back.
The robot spun smoothly on its axis, bringing two arms into striking position. The gladiator’s slow approach slowed further as it closed the distance.
Twenty feet out, it stopped. Muscles bunched in its legs. It gathered itself, tightening to stillness, crouching like black stone—limbs cocked beneath it, eyes glaring across the lake of straw.
